Search Engine Marketing Explained

We hear and read a lot about Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This article aims to describe what SEM is and what it can do for your business.

Search engine marketing, is a combination of promotional techniques and tactics to improve a website’s ranking on search engines. The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) handle over 90 percent of the web searches on the Internet.

There are two elements that deliver effective search engine marketing, which are SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) advertising.

Search engine marketing has become an important part of successful online marketing because over 80 percent of online users are using search engines to find information and websites they are interested in. Therefore, using effective search engine marketing tactics will ensure search engines and online users can find your website.

The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to make it easy for the search engines to index your website and to help it to rank high when Internet users are looking for your products and services. Your goal should be to be at least on the first page. No one can guarantee you to be number one, but you should be working towards this goal.

SEO is part art and part science. There are several areas on your website that will influence your ranking on the search engines:

• Adding keywords
• Meta description (information about your website)
• Making your website SEO friendly
• Incoming and outgoing links

Dealing with these areas is a starting point, but as you will understand, your competitors may be doing the same thing. There are many more ‘behind the scenes’ techniques that can be used to improve your ranking (and increase the traffic to your website) but they fall outside of the scope of this article. The search engines are also constantly changing their ranking algorithms, meaning that your SEO efforts have to be continuous.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is where you pay money to the search engine companies to have your text ad display on the side of the search screen. You only pay when visitors click on your ad, which makes it a very efficient way of advertising. The price you pay per click is based on a rather complicated auction system that results in the highest bidder getting the top spot on the ads. A lot depends on the keyword(s) that you are bidding on. For example ‘Real Estate’ is a highly competitive keyword and would cost more to buy than a more specific search term such as ‘Red Deer Real Estate’.

Google allows advertisers to further narrow down the geographic area that the ads are shown. If you have no interest in foreign markets, you can choose to only have your ad showing in Canada, or only Alberta.

Search Engine Marketing is an important part of your online marketing strategy. By making some intelligent decisions while developing and managing your website, your chances for success will increase dramatically.